In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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a minimum element of insecurity, of chance, till the results are announced—this gap is the gap between the constative and the performative, between measuring the results and taking note of them (registering them) in the full sense of the symbolic act. The whole mystique of bureaucracy at its most sublime hinges on this gap: you know the facts, but you can never be quite sure of how these facts will be registered by bureaucracy. The same holds for elections: in the electoral process the moment of contingency, of hazard, of a “lottery,” is crucial. Fully “rational” elections would not be elections at all, but a transparent objectivized process.
Traditional (pre-modern) societies resolved this problem by invoking a transcendental source which “verified” the result, conferring authority on it (God, King . . .). Therein resides the problem of modernity: modern societies perceive themselves as autonomous, self-regulated; that is, they can no longer rely on an external (transcendental) source of authority. But, nonetheless, the moment of hazard has to remain operative in the electoral process, which is why commentators like to dwell on the “irrationality” of votes (one never knows which way votes will swing in the last days before elections . . .). In other words, democracy would not work if it were reduced to permanent opinion-polling—fully mechanized and quantified, deprived of its “performative” character. As Claude Lefort pointed out, voting has to remain a (sacrificial) ritual, a ritualistic self-destruction and rebirth of society.13 The reason is that this hazard itself should not be transparent, it should be minimally externalized/reified: the “people’s will” is our equivalent of what the Ancients perceived as the imponderable will of God or the hands of Fate. What people cannot accept as their direct arbitrary choice, the result of a pure contingency, they can do if this hazard is referred to a minimum of the “real”—Hegel knew this long ago, this is the entire point of his defense of monarchy. And, last but not least, the same goes for love: there should be an element of the “answer of the Real” in it (“we were forever meant for each other”), I cannot really accept that my falling in love hinges on a purely aleatory process.14
It is only against this background that one can properly locate the function of the Master. The Master is the one who receives gifts in such a way that his acceptance of a gift is perceived by the subject who provided the gift as its own reward. As such, the Master is thus correlative to the subject caught in the double movement of what Freud called Versagung (renunciation): the gesture by means of which the subject gives what is most precious to him and, in exchange, is himself turned into an object of exchange, is correlative to the gesture of giving in the very act of receiving. The Master’s refusal of exchange is correlative to the redoubled, self-reflected, exchange on the side of the subject who exchanges (gives what is most precious to him) and is exchanged.
The trick of capitalism, of course, is that this asymmetry is concealed in the ideological appearance of equivalent exchange: the double non-exchange is masked as free exchange. This is why, as was clear to Lacan, psychoanalysis—not only as a theory, but above all as a specific intersubjective practice, as a unique form of social link—could have emerged only within capitalist society where intersubjective relations are mediated by money. Money—paying the analyst—is necessary in order to keep him out of circulation, to avoid getting him involved in the imbroglio of passions which generated the patient’s pathology. This is why a psychoanalyst is not a Master-figure, but, rather, a kind of “prostitute of the mind,” having recourse to money for the same reason some prostitutes like to be paid so that they can have sex without personal involvement, maintaining their distance—here, we encounter the function of money at its purest.
There are similarities between analytic treatment and the ritual of potlatch. Marcel Mauss, in his “Essai sur le don,”15 first described the paradoxical logic of potlatch, of the reciprocal exchange of gifts. Gift and exchange are, of course, opposed in their immanent logic: a true gift is by definition an act of generosity, given without expecting something in return, while exchange is necessarily reciprocal—I give something, expecting something else in exchange. Potlatch is a short-circuit (inter-section) of the two sets: an exchange in the form of its opposite, of two acts of voluntary gift-giving (and the point is, of course, that such acts are not secondary with regard to exchange, but precede and ground it). The same holds for psychoanalytic treatment, in which the analyst is not paid for the work he does in a set of equivalent exchanges (so much for an interpretation of a dream, so much for the dissolution of a symptom, etc., with the ironic prospect of offering a special discount: “buy three dream interpretations and get one for free . . .”)—the moment the relationship starts to function like this, we are no longer in the analyst’s discourse (social link). But neither is the analyst restoring the patient’s mental health out of the goodness of his heart, for free: the analyst’s acts have nothing to do with goodness, with helping a neighbor—again, the moment the patient perceives the analyst as acting out of goodness, this can lead even to a psychotic crisis, and trigger a paranoid outburst. So, as in potlach, the exchange between the analyst and the analysand is between two incommensurable excesses: the analyst is paid for nothing, as a gift, his price is always exorbitant (typically, the patients oscillate between complaining that the price is too high and bouts of excessive gratitude—“how can I ever repay you for what you did . . .”), and the patient gets some help, an improvement in his condition, as an unintended by-product. As Lacan makes clear, the underlying problem here is how to determine the price of that which has no price.
How, then, are we to resolve the enigma of potlatch? Mauss’s solution is a mystical X which circulates in exchange. Claude Lévi-Strauss reduced the mystique to its “rational core”: reciprocity, exchange as such—the meaning of reciprocal exchange of gifts is exchange itself as the enactment of social link.16 There is, however, something missing in this Lévi-Straussian solution;17 it was Pierre Bourdieu18 who asked here the crucial “Marxist” question as to why (in Marx’s words) “Political Economy has indeed analyzed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labor is represented by the value of its product and labor-time by the magnitude of that value.”19 If the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the “mystified” form of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. (If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other’s gift—recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year’s present once again . . .) However, Bourdieu’s solution remains all too vulgar Marxist: he evokes hidden economic “interests.” It was Marshall Sahlins who proposed a different, more pertinent, solution: the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most fundamental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit for tat.20 To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person’s gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the “pre-economy of the economy,” its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non-productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlatch is thus simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely.
Ulysses’ realpolitik
The obscene underside that haunts the dignity of the Master-Signifier from its very inception, or the secret alliance between the dignity of the Law and its obscene transgression, was first clearly outlined by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, his most uncanny play, effectively a postmodern work avant la lettre. In his influential Shakespearean Tragedy, which set the coordinates of the traditional academic reading of Shakespeare, A.C. Bradley, the great English Hegelian, speaks of
a certain limitation, a partial suppression